Elara started asking better questions.
That was the problem.
Suspicion Peter could work with. Suspicion expected lies and watched for fear. Lords, guards, even maesters, they all circled the same broad shape: who are you, what do you want, how dangerous are you. Big questions. Political questions. Questions you could survive with broad answers and careful posture.
Engineers asked worse ones.
Engineers looked at a thing until the thing gave up one truth, then used that truth to pry open five more. Elara didn't ask where are you from in the social sense. She asked where did you learn to machine a spring channel that fine. She asked what kind of workshop produces steel this light. She asked why his trigger tolerances assumed uniformity no hand-filed piece in the North could guarantee.
She asked questions that had answers.
That was what made them dangerous.
The workshop had gone back to something close to normal after the previous day's progress, if normal now included one half-repaired web-shooter hidden under a folded cloth whenever anyone besides Jory or Luwin came through, and Peter being walked there each morning with less obvious supervision and more visible trust than before.
Winterfell had not recovered from Bran's fall. It had simply learned to carry it. The castle moved around the wound now. Catelyn did not come out. Ned's face had gone harder in ways Peter only caught in passing glimpses across courtyards or hallways. Arya moved faster, spoke less, and had developed the new habit of appearing outside the workshop door at random intervals as if checking whether useful things still existed in the world.
The south remained. The king hunted. The queen watched. Jaime drifted through rooms like a threat with excellent posture. Tyrion had begun collecting Winterfell in details. Peter knew because twice now he had found the Imp's eyes on him from across a hall and both times the attention had felt less like curiosity than bookkeeping.
Under all of that, the roots kept failing.
Peter had not touched the godswood again, but the memory of the signal sat in him like an unfinished sentence. He could feel the North under the castle now if he got still enough. Weakly. Broken transmission under stone. Not enough to be useful yet. More than enough to be distracting.
And in the workshop, the right web-shooter lay in pieces.
Again.
Elara had dismantled the newly stabilized assembly with no ceremony the minute she decided the release timing still annoyed her.
Peter respected this. He also hated it.
"You can't keep taking apart the only working version."
"I can if the working version is ugly."
"That's not a real standard."
"It's my standard."
Peter looked down at the bench where the trigger housing, spring chamber, and nozzle assembly had been laid out in a line so exact it could have been measured against a ruler. "Your standards are tyrannical."
Elara did not look up from the thin brass shim she was filing. "And yet they keep producing results."
That was annoyingly difficult to dispute.
Peter leaned against the edge of the worktable, careful of the warped board near the corner because he'd learned that one the hard way yesterday, and watched her work. He'd begun doing that more than was strictly necessary. Not in a dreamy way. In the same way he watched good code unfold on a screen or a clean weld bead or a subway track switching under load. Competence had its own gravity.
Elara caught him at it this time.
"Well."
Peter blinked. "Well what."
"You've been watching me file a brass shim for half a minute." She blew metal dust off the edge without lifting her eyes. "Either you have a correction or you've gone strange in a new direction."
"I've been strange in this direction the whole time."
That got a snort.
Small. Real. Gone immediately after, but real enough to count.
He should have left the moment there.
Instead he said, "You're good."
This time she did look at him.
Not flustered. Not warmed exactly. Just arrested for one beat by the bluntness of it.
"So are you," she said.
Then, like the line had cost more than she preferred, she went back to the shim.
Peter felt that in places he did not want to inventory.
He crossed his arms and looked down at the spring housing because metal was safer than eye contact and because there were now too many currents in the room that had nothing to do with pressure valves.
Elara fit the shim against the chamber wall. Not satisfied. Filed again. Held it up to the light.
Then, without changing tone at all, she said, "Who taught you."
There it was.
No warning. No broad lead-in. No social cushioning.
Peter looked over. "What."
"Not books." She set the shim down. "Books don't do this." Her fingers tapped once against the disassembled web-shooter. "This isn't a clever man's theory. It's practice. Repeated practice. Someone taught you. Or several someones. Who."
Peter looked at the bench.
At first glance, there were a hundred possible answers in front of him. Stark tech. Empire State lab access. scavenged junk and internet forums and one very dead billionaire's influence threading through the shape of his life whether he liked it or not. Aunt May handing him tools when he was twelve. Uncle Ben teaching him to keep a steady wrist and respect torque even on cheap bolts. Mostly himself after that, because necessity had always been the first and meanest teacher.
He could not say any of that cleanly.
So he reached for the half-truth nearest his hand.
"My uncle taught me the basics."
Elara's eyes sharpened. Not because she'd caught the lie in full. Because she heard what was missing in it.
"The basics don't become this on their own."
"No."
"So who after that."
He shrugged one shoulder. "A lot of breaking things. A lot of rebuilding them. A lot of getting it wrong."
"That part I believe." She picked up the chamber housing and turned it in her fingers. "But you speak of pressure like it's measured. Exact. As if you've seen tools finer than any in this castle."
Peter looked away and immediately knew that had been a mistake.
Elara saw everything when she was tracking a mechanism, and right now the mechanism was him.
"I have," he said.
"What tools."
The question came too fast for a dodge to look natural. Peter felt the whole room narrow.
Luwin wasn't here. Jory wasn't in the doorway. The workshop was quiet except for the low hiss of the brazier and the faint life of Winterfell beyond the walls. No audience. No political stakes immediate enough to help him lie by making the room tense.
Just Elara and a bench and a question built for truth.
He went with the smallest answer that would still satisfy some part of the machine.
"Precision lathes. Calibrated drills. Pressure gauges. Better spring steel."
Elara stared at him.
Then said, very softly, "From where."
Peter looked at her and understood all over again that this was why she was more dangerous than the others.
Not because she wanted to expose him. Because she wanted to understand him.
He could have handled hatred more easily.
The workshop door opened before he had to answer.
Both of them looked up too sharply, caught in the same instant of relief and irritation.
Arya slipped inside.
Not with her usual half-feral certainty this time. Slower. Watching. She had no sword at her hip today. No visible mischief. Just that sharpened quiet she'd been carrying since Bran fell and a wool shawl around her shoulders she looked like she'd accepted under protest from an adult with more patience than anyone should have.
She stopped near the bench and looked from Elara to Peter.
"You're both making that face."
Elara set the housing down. "What face."
"The one where nobody's talking and it's still loud."
Peter stared at Arya.
Arya stared back as if this were a very ordinary thing to say.
Elara, after one beat, said, "That's not a useful description."
"It is if you have eyes."
That one nearly got Peter.
He bit the inside of his cheek and failed not to smile.
Arya stepped closer to the bench and eyed the spread of parts. "Did you fix it."
"Almost," Peter said.
"That means no."
"That means complicated."
Arya considered this. Then reached into the shawl and produced an apple from nowhere because Stark children apparently had the same spatial relationship to pockets that northern horsemen had to rope.
She held it out to Peter.
Not shyly. Not ceremonially. Just there.
Peter blinked.
"For what."
Arya frowned as if the question itself were a little stupid. "You're here."
That was all.
No elaboration. No speech about gratitude or wolves or Bran or godswoods. Just a direct child logic of exchange. He had become part of her map enough to be included in the existence of apples.
Peter took it carefully.
"Thanks."
She shrugged one shoulder as if to make clear the gift implied no larger emotional consequences and bit into a second apple she had also apparently been storing on her person without violating any known laws of volume.
Elara watched the whole thing from the bench and said, "Remarkable. She likes you."
Arya said around the bite, "I don't."
Peter looked at the apple in his hand. Red. Slightly bruised on one side. Perfect.
"Your whole family has a really interesting way of saying kind things."
Arya ignored that and turned to Elara. "Robb wants the hinge fixed before supper. The southern one. The one that groans."
Elara closed her eyes briefly. "Of course he does."
Arya looked at Peter. "Can he help."
Not can he be trusted. Not should the prisoner be allowed. Just practical. Can this useful thing be useful.
Elara's gaze drifted back to him.
There was the answer to the earlier question, sitting in the room between them. Not words. Access. If she took him to another mechanism, another problem, another space in the castle, his usefulness deepened and so did his place in Winterfell's internal logic. Peter could feel that for what it was.
A step.
Useful was dangerous. More useful was more dangerous.
But standing still was how you became furniture, and furniture in castles got moved by other people.
"Yes," Elara said.
Arya nodded once, satisfied, and vanished as quickly as she'd arrived.
The room settled around the absence she left behind.
Peter looked at the apple again.
Then, because the interruption had broken the tension just enough to make honesty survivable in smaller pieces, he said to Elara, "My world has better tools."
She leaned back against the bench. Arms crossing loosely this time, not defensive, just waiting. "I gathered."
"But better tools aren't the whole answer." He looked at the disassembled web-shooter. "Tools help. Materials help. But mostly..." He stopped. Tried again. "Mostly I had room to fail without starving over it."
Elara's face changed by a degree.
Not pity. She didn't strike him as someone who wasted that. Recognition maybe. Or the sharp appreciation of someone hearing the shape of another person's life in one line.
She uncrossed her arms and picked up the shim again.
"That," she said, "is a better answer."
Peter exhaled softly through his nose. Not relief exactly. More like one gear finally finding the next.
He bit into the apple.
Crisp. Cold. Sweet enough to hurt a little after workshop air and iron.
Elara went back to the web-shooter. "If your world has such fine tools, why make this by hand."
The question should have been easy.
It wasn't.
Because the answer was poverty and secrecy and New York apartment counters and fixing your own life because no one else was going to do it for you. The answer was being Peter Parker, which somehow in every reality kept reducing to improvisation under pressure.
He chewed. Swallowed.
"Because I had to."
Elara nodded once.
No further push. Not because curiosity had gone. Because she knew enough now to leave the next layer for another day. Good mechanic's instinct. Never force the whole machine at once if one more turn will shear the thread.
She held the spring housing out to him.
"Then show me where this breaks if I overfile the seat."
They bent back over the bench together.
Question deferred, not answered. The dangerous kind. The kind that waited.
That was how the rest of the afternoon went.
Not smoothly. Better than smoothly. Productively. Questions came in fragments now, embedded in work where Peter could answer around the truth instead of straight into it.
"Why are your tolerances so fine."
"Because if they aren't, it fails under use."
"What kind of use."
"Fast use."
"How fast."
"Faster than here."
"That's not a place."
"It is if you've lived there."
She gave him a look for that one and moved on.
By the time Jory returned to collect him, the right web-shooter's chamber seat had been refined to something both of them distrusted slightly less than before, the apple core sat beside the charcoal scraps, and Peter knew with the certainty of a man stepping onto thin ice that Elara Flint was not going to stop asking.
Good.
Terrible.
Good.
Jory stopped in the doorway and looked between them, his expression flattening in that way it did when he thought two variables had become one complication too many.
"Done."
Elara answered for both of them. "No."
Jory's eyes moved to Peter. "You coming."
Peter straightened slowly, the workshop's warmth already starting to feel like something he would miss ten minutes from now.
Elara did not look up this time when she said, "Tomorrow. Better answers."
Not a request.
Peter adjusted his sleeves. "I'll see what I can do."
She made a soft, unimpressed sound.
But she didn't say no.
That, too, was an answer.
[END OF CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT]